February 25th, 2021
a 45th anniversary edition of gordon lightfoot's 'summertime dream' that's marketed to dog owners and dogs alike
Sometimes I think I’m doing pretty all right with this whole ‘year into a pandemic’ thing but then I realize when I try to remember what I got done during the day I start reciting the Oscar Isaac monologue from Annihilation (2018) where he talks about his thoughts flowing out of his mind like quicksilver before self-immolating with a white phosphorus grenade.
This is how I look when I wake up at 9 am every morning and I haven’t even had to cut one of my soldiers’ stomachs open to see if his intestines have become motile!
Now I’m fully confident that if I was stuck in Area X as Oscar Isaac I would have simply maintained my sanity by rotating a perfect cube in my mind whenever something fucked up happened or content myself with the reminder that I was Oscar Isaac and hot as hell but I guess that’s just not enough for everyone. I would however feel conflicted about my place in the military-industrial complex as a career soldier.
I think I had a point here but I think all this making me want to do is re-watch Annihilation (2018). Fuck, that movie pounds. There’s no way I’m in the right headspace to see it again when all I do is clomp around my apartment all day doing my shitty little chores though.
From me to you, dear reader, I can simply say “hang in there, baby”
Anyway, I figure if I’m going through a bad time even though I’m applying a large amount of rigor to my life in the form of blasting my quads on an exercise bike five times a week and eating a single orange for breakfast, you’re probably going through some shit too. I won’t say it’s okay because our elected officials have the blood of 500,000 people on their hands, but once this pandemic ends, it’s a whole new world. Anything could happen. Use your imagination!1
The Game Zone: Destiny 2: Season of the Chosen (2021)
Nice abandoned space ship you got here…hope nothing FUCKED UP or WEIRD happens to me while I’m on it
I’m sorry to say that even though I wish this were not the case one of my coping mechanisms during the pandemic and even before it started was pretending to be an immortal space wizard in Destiny 2, the *sigh* science fiction “looter shooter” made by Bungie, the studio you may know from the first three entries of the Halo series or, if you’re committed to being an enormous prick about it, the Marathon trilogy and Oni.
If you’re unfamiliar with the conceit of the game or its first installment, the setup is space explorers on Mars found a big orb called The Traveller that propelled us into an age of triumph and wonder. Eventually, after we colonized most of our solar system, the cosmic personification of darkness and entropy rolled up on our shit and kicked us back to the dark age, but like if the dark age had nuclear weapons. Then a bunch of alien races came to the Sol system and really started going apeshit on us.
The Traveller—in a last ditch effort to stop our collective shit from getting completely pushed in—sent out a bunch of annoying little robots called Ghosts (who used to be voiced by Tyrion Lannister but he got replaced because people thought he didn’t do a very good job) to revive dead people without any memories of their past life. The tradeoff for being an amnesiac is you can’t die anymore (sort of) because Ghost can bring you back to life whenever you bite it and you get access to cosmic powers that enable you to drive back the forces pushing humanity to the brink of extinction.
One of the new weapons you can get this season is a bow that fires homing fire arrows that mark targets and make them explode if you hit them again with a headshot—it’s really badass if your definition of “badass” is “stupid shit that sucks” like mine is
There’s a lot more going on than that about whether or not being an immortal freak who can basically slam dunk a black hole onto unsuspecting aliens whenever they please is actually good for your brain, but we don’t have all day here and basically none of the story is delivered in a way that would be comprehensible unless, like me, you just like reading a lot of lore tabs on the guns and armor you’re picking up as you gallivant around like an asshole on the frozen moon of Europa or a defunct Russian spaceport called the Cosmodrome. The conceit exists to give you an excuse to blast aliens with cool guns and powers and man does it provide.
This season you’re tasked with destabilizing one of alien races you’ve been fighting’s military by rolling up on their ancestral proving rights and killing everything in sight, which is—to be fair—the objective in Destiny 2 most of the time. I will say however that Bungie really knocked it out of the park in Season of the Chosen because they added in a mission where you crawl through a haunted spaceship trying to figure out what happened to everyone onboard, and when you finish the mission you get a swank-ass gold-inlaid lever action rifle called the Dead Man’s Tale.
The sound design is scary as shit the first time you play through it and it was a blast to do without knowing what I was in store for. Plus—free gun!
When someone rolls up on you with this in the game’s PvP mode, you best believe you’ve yee’d your last haw, cowboy
This thing is funny as hell because as you hit headshots with it a little inlay on the sights glows brighter and brighter and once you hit enough it does a little whistle like in an Ennio Morricone score from a spaghetti western. Everyone I play with calls it the Yeehaw Rifle or the Cowboy Gun and every time I equip it I say “be rootin’, be tootin’ and by god be shootin’, but above all—be kind.”
The only other thing of note is that they got Oded Fehr, who you may recall as the hot guy who wasn’t Brendan Fraser in The Mummy (1999), to voice a character called Osiris whose two main things are being kind of a dick and being in love with a big Russian robot named Saint-14.
Listening to him say all sorts of made-up sci-fi horseshit like “the information we acquired from the Cabal’s Otzot prediction matrix is incomplete…” and “everything aboard this ship appears to be dying a contiguous neuron death…” really makes me feel for the guy because you have to imagine he goes into the recording being like “man, what the fuck” but maybe being in The Mummy trains you for this sort of stuff.
The Book Zone: Titus Groan (1946), Mervyn Peake
Congrats to my friend Tom who will be collecting his three mention the creep zone challenge coin for this one. Tom and I have been doing a two man book club throughout the pandemic to keep our minds limber and to ensure we’re at least reading like, a book once in a while, and we started with Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun tetralogy, which we both quite enjoyed and found made for breezy conversations in between bouts of Super Smash Brothers and a new co-op playthrough of Dark Souls 3.
By contrast, it feels as though we have been reading Titus Groan for an eternity and (not to put words in my friend’s mouth because I know he’s an avid the creep zone reader—hi Tom!) neither of us can wait for it to end it seems.
Titus Groan is the first of three novels detailing the last days of Gormenghast, a sprawling gothic castle set amid a barren wasteland, and the annoying freaks who populate it. An issue Peake runs into is that he’s made the ambitious decision to make all of his characters positively ancient, either physically or mentally, which means all they can do is have extremely circular, extremely British conversations where two characters talk past each other without even attempting to find any sort of common ground.
I would describe Peake as having great technical skill leveraged in the service of writing the most banal shit possible. You could say this was a clever way to describe the hollowness and brittleness of the British aristocracy in the wake of World War II, but the issue with that is that the characters who aren’t blue-blooded scions of the Groan line are to a person characterized as venal, petty and just as worthy of scorn and embarrassment as the rest of the cast.
The book starts with the birth of Titus Groan, son of the 76th Earl of Gormenghast and his wife, the Countess Gertrude. Then Peake spends the next 250 pages introducing various characters, including Steerpike, a kitchenhand who slowly but surely works his way up the rungs of power by ingratiating himself with various other characters we meet. Finally, a form of climax comes as Steerpike, in an effort to make the final leap from ingratiating himself with the Earl’s sisters Cora and Clarice with the Earl himself by “rescuing” him and his son from the Earl’s library, which he has instructed Cora and Clarice to set on fire during one of Gormenghast’s many interminable rituals.
Unfortunately for Steerpike, the Earl suffers from intense melancholia and only finds solace in his books, so instead of thanking and rewarding him he goes mad on account of their destruction and starts insisting that he is not a man but a “death-owl,” which is apparently a kind of big, fucked up man-eating owl that lives in one of Gormenghast’s towers. Oh well. Better luck next time Steerpike!
Apparently things “pick up” in the next book, which advances the timeframe to when Titus is a young man and capable of agency, but good lord that is an awful lot of preamble to be press-ganged into doing in the hopes that the next book will be better. Plus after we finish Titus Groan, Tom and I are planning to take a long break to watch anime and talk about that instead.
The Sweetie of the Week: Kenji López-Alt of Kenji’s Cooking Show
This guy rocks. I’ve been watching his videos before I go to bed and his whole deal is he’s a chef who films his show on a GoPro and he does all his shit off-the-cuff in his house so you just think you’re talking to some guy. It’s very soothing and he seems nice.
Not one for the parasocial relationships and his channel’s pretty meat-centered so it might be a no-go for the vegetarians reading this, but he has nice dogs and in this one he stops himself from saying something mean about a burger he had in Colorado one time and admits that he was trying to hide his hard seltzer from the camera shot because he didn’t want anyone to see it.
The Digestif: Cold Sword, Sheer Mag
It’s Sheer Mag, baby! Best in the business of rocking out, in my humble opinion even though I can’t stop singing the chorus of this song as “it’s a cool, cool sword” which to be fair is basically every sword.
These high temps got me amped for spring even though the summer always really fucks me up and this one will probably be no different. It’s just how I am! But what always makes me feel better about summer is music that sounds like it was made to be listened to on your car stereo in a bowling alley parking lot under one of those big street lamps with someone you’re trying (and failing) to impress.
Until next time ya creeps. Be good.
If my CIA handler is reading this, all this means is getting really good at doing finger puppets and you can’t prove otherwise.